LONDON — In 1801, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, decided to “renovate” the Parthenon in Athens. Over the next 11 years, his teams stripped the classical Greek temple of half of its ornamental marble sculptures and shipped them to Britain. In 1817, Lord Elgin sold the Parthenon Marbles to the British government and they have since been on permanent display at the British Museum in London.
Thus began a permanent conflict between the museum and Greece on the property of the 2,500 year old marbles, today also mentioned by some in the UNITED KINGDOM like the Elgin Marbles. Athens says Greek goods have been stolen from them and wants them back. The British Museum says it legally owns and preserves them.
The Anglo-Hellenic cultural conflict made headlines, thanks to an interview that Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, gave to the Greek newspaper Ta Nea at the end of January. Fischer reiterated the museum’s boilerplate arguments for their preservation, but he also said that Elgin’s transfer of the sculptures to London could be seen as a “creative act.”
Fischer was I try to explain that the British Museum’s exhibition of the marbles places them in the context of global developments in art, educating visitors and allowing them to see how classical Greek art influenced the art of other cultures over time. centuries. But the quote generated a storm of negative blowback.
“It was an incredibly tone-deaf response,” says Tatiana Flessas, an expert in cultural property and heritage law at the London School of Economics. Fischer’s reasoning doesn’t work well in Greece anyway, says Flessas. The Greeks don’t consider them art objects, she explains. “The Greeks consider them their history.”
Elgin’s removal and sale of the marbles was already controversial at the time, although Elgin claimed to have had permission from the Ottoman government – which was then occupying Greece – to take them. At the beginning of his 19 yearsth century, “The Pilgrimage of Childe Harold,” Lord Byron called their removal a degradation. Greece’s efforts to recover them began in earnest in the 1980s, and since then it has unsuccessfully pleaded with several British governments to accede to its demands.
And although Greece has threatened to take legal action, it has not yet done so. Maybe that’s because he would probably lose, Flessas said. “From a strictly legal point of view, it would be difficult for Greece to make its case,” explaining that the transfer was considered legal at the time and that modern law cannot be applied retroactively. Additionally, the British Museum Act 1963 does not allow the museum to dispose of objects without government approval.
The British Museum – along with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris – is one of many so-called encyclopedic museums located in major cities around the world and which exhibit millennia-old works of art from disparate cultures. These institutions come from the Age of Enlightenment and consider themselves the guardians of great art which now belongs to humanity and not to a single country. For the British Museum, returning works of art to their country of origin means giving in to nationalism.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that their collections are filled with works of art looted by the imperial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries. “The encyclopedic part is a diversion, designed to get around the inconvenient fact of the colonialist mentality that lurked, and still lurks behind, the acquisition and preservation of extraterrestrial artifacts,” says Paul Cartledge, professor emeritus of Greek. at the University of Cambridge. culture.
Since the end of the colonial era in the 1980s, several countries have sought, with mixed results, to force museums to repatriate certain works of their art. For example, Nigeria wants the British Museum and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to return the hundreds of bronzes, sculptures and metal plaques from Benin that they have. Meanwhile, Ethiopia wants its Maqdala treasures, a range of artwork and clothing, returned to the many museums that now own them.
But Greece’s efforts to find the marbles constitute the most high-profile case, one that has attracted support from celebrities ranging from George Clooney to Bill Murray.
Museums fear that if they acquiesce to these demands, it would open the floodgates to more of them, ultimately depriving them of their treasures.
“This will never happen,” says Marlen Godwin, spokesperson for the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM). Many countries don’t have the space or facilities to display all their artwork, and it serves them well to display it in the world’s biggest museums, Godwin says. “These are advertisements for these countries.”
The British Museum has hinted it is willing to return some high-profile artifacts to their countries of origin in the form of a long-term loan. Nigeria indicated last year that it would be willing to lend the bronzes, but Greece and Ethiopia have refused to lend them, saying they should not have to borrow what is theirs.
Repatriation is popular with the public. A YouGov 2017 survey found that 55 percent of Britons thought the marbles should return to Greece. “But ultimately it’s a political question,” Flessas says. And the requests for repatriation resonate with certain political leaders.
Last November, a report commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron said thousands of African works of art taken during the colonial era but now kept in French museums should be returned to their countries of origin. And back in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labor Party, declared that if he became Prime Minister he would return the marbles to Greece.
But Corbyn was only reiterating a long-standing commitment of the Labor Party – one that two former Labor prime ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, chose to ignore once in power. Flessas therefore views Corbyn’s comments with skepticism. “It remains an open question whether he would actually do it.”
